Friday, December 19, 2008

A Little Bit Nuts

Cozy evenings sipping hot chocolate by the crackling fire, with the children looking like models in their comfy fuzzy sleepers and everyone smiling at one another while listening to carols on the hi-fi. That's what the evenings leading up to Christmas should be, but never are.

I try to cram everything in that I think would create a warm Christmas memory for my children, but what usually results is I make myself a little bit more nuts because I don't have enough hours in the day to accomplish it all.

We decorated the tree, and this year I let the two older kids take charge of most of the ornament placement. And it was good. They actually did a phenomenal job of spacing the ornaments out instead of clustering them like they did last year.

We posed for photos and sent out our Christmas cards. M and K helped stick labels and stamps on and lick envelopes. K would stick out his tongue and I'd run the envelope glue along his tongue. It's good that someone likes to lick those envelopes.

We went for a pajama-clad drive, complete with popcorn, to see the holiday lights in several neighborhoods. We may have completed this ritual a little early in the season since it was still early December, but we did it nonetheless.

We have watched The Grinch, A Charlie Brown Christmas (twice!), Frosty and a few new offerings (that I don't know what they were called) and let M stay up later to watch even though she had school in the morning. This resulted in tired, cranky kids, but we did it anyway because that's what you're supposed to do.

But we have not made and decorated sugar cookies this year. The kids had a blast decorating them last year, but I do not have it in me to do them this year. Also, we are running out of time. The kids do not have school on Monday or Tuesday so we'll probably make cookies for Santa then. They will be chocolate chip cookies this year. They may even be a pan cookie variety.

This is how I am cutting back a little bit this year. Maybe not much of a cut back, but really, have you ever made those sugar cookies from scratch? It's such a long process, the rolling out, the cutting, the rolling out again, more cutting. Phew! I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Besides, I've heard Santa likes chocolate chip cookies just as much.

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Anonymous said...

I need to cut back. Mother nature has been forcing us to slow down, or trying to drive us crazy. We keep getting storms on the weekends, and lost power for 3 1/2 days last week.

I haven't finished shopping AND haven't even begun wrapping gifts. Don't know how I'm going to pull it all off.

for a different kind of girl said...

We haven't made cookies yet, either, and to be honest, we'll probably end up just making chocolate chip cookies to have when we leave them out on Christmas eve. My mom has made the cut-out cookies and frozen them for us to decorate when my sister and her family arrives. I just don't have it in me to do those this year (at least as of this writing!). It's a lot of me making them and a lot of my help scurrying away after the first batch! Plus, I think my hips are still wearing about two dozen from last year!

Anonymous said...

oh goodness I really should be baking more!!

Jeff and Charli Lee said...

It's odd the things I remember the most about my childhood Christmases. Things like my mom's glass angel ornaments and putting the radio station call letters in our window - not so much the car rides and the tree decorations. I guess it just means that you can't create the memories for your kids as much as the can for themselves.

 
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